Chapter Text
“Here’s the plan,” Natasha said. “We head to that Thai place by your apartment to celebrate mission success, then I pretend to get an urgent call from Fury. Bam—you’re on a date.”
“I don’t want to be on a date,” Steve said, glancing toward the cockpit to make sure Maria couldn’t hear.
“Why not? She’s a no-nonsense ass-kicking brunette in the military. I’ve done my research. That’s exactly your type.”
“I’m not sure you can declare a type based off one example,” Steve said drily.
“I’m open to further input,” Natasha allowed, kicking a leg up on the table. “Describe to me your ideal romantic partner. What do they look like? What’s their background? What sort of path are they on?”
I’m on the highway to hell! the speakers blared. On the highway to hell!
Natasha, shifting from smirking to businesslike faster than Steve could grasp what was happening, was already heading for the cockpit. He hastily followed.
“It just started playing,” Maria said, jabbing at buttons and flipping switches on the flight panel to obviously no avail. The music—as Steve had come to recognize it was, after a somewhat jarring first encounter with what Clint had assured him was “basically the Sinatra of the eighties”—was loud and all-encompassing, emanating from every corner of the quinjet.
“Iron Man,” Natasha said.
“Black Widow,” said a voice over the music, which dropped in volume in perfect sync. “Did you miss me?”
A gleaming red figure appeared in front of the windshield just as the music ratcheted back up on the line Hey mama, look at me. One of his glowing eyes winked.
“Captain,” Maria said, sudden urgency coloring her voice. The screen in front of her had switched from declaring PA SYSTEM OVERRIDE to FLIGHT CONTROL OVERRIDE. Iron Man had dropped back out of sight.
Natasha took Maria’s place in the copilot’s seat; both women worked swiftly at the controls. Steve cleared his throat and spoke loudly. “Iron Man.”
The music politely receded again at Steve’s words. “Captain,” Iron Man said. “I thought the quinjet was flying straighter and more true than usual. Must be all that patriotism.”
“What do you want?”
“God, I thought you’d never ask. Let’s see. I’d like a pony. A million dollars. World peace, of course. And…you. What do you say, let me take you out?”
He appeared in front of the quinjet again, somehow managing to lean against the windshield like a quarterback crowding his girlfriend up against a locker despite the near-supersonic speeds at which they were traveling.
Natasha swiveled the Gatling gun around and fired. Iron Man barely managed to dodge the hail of bullets. He dropped back and flew over the top of the jet, where the weapons couldn’t reach.
ALL CONTROLS OVERRIDE, the screen announced.
“Where are you taking us?” Steve strode back to the main cabin. A jump and a twist, and the ceiling hatch swung open to blue sky and screaming wind.
“How about Seattle? The Space Needle? They’ve got a cozy little restaurant up there, very romantic. Gives you a 360-degree view of the whole city. If I make reservations now you can be eating lobster off my fork in twenty minutes.”
Steve hoisted himself through the hatch, crouching low on the sleek surface of the roof as the wind sliced around him. Iron Man was flying alongside the jet, a supervillain escort none of them had asked for. Steve shifted on the balls of his feet. He gauged distance, speed, angle, force—then threw his shield.
It made dead-center impact, knocking Iron Man off course and sending him spinning out into the wild blue yonder. The shield ricocheted back to Steve’s grip. But in only a moment Iron Man was back on course—and the quinjet was off it.
The portside wing dipped, and then the jet was falling. It fell like a maple seed, spinning in tighter and tighter circles as it lost altitude. Steve dropped back into the cabin. “So that’s a raincheck on the date, then?” Iron Man’s voice said through the speakers.
Maria was already buckling herself into the copilot’s seat. She met Steve’s eyes, acknowledging—then hit the button to eject herself into the sky. Natasha was still moving over the flight panel, trying to wrest back control.
“I can do it, I can kick him off—” Natasha said, as Steve picked her up by the waist and set her down behind the chairs. He handed her a parachute and she strapped it on, scowling at him.
“My tablet—” she said, looking toward the table where they’d been sitting minutes earlier. The angle of the cabin was approaching a thirty degree tilt; anything that wasn’t strapped down had heaped against the wall. Steve yanked the side door open.
“I’ll get it,” he promised, and pushed her out.
He stayed with the jet until almost the moment of impact, gathering a few items that would be inconvenient to lose. The song had finished. He almost missed it. Iron Man wasn’t saying anything, and that Steve didn’t miss—he didn’t need a supervillain narrating this descent to earth, a cruel echo of the way Peggy had stayed with him until the very end.
The ground was getting closer. Steve backed against the opposite wall, then took a running leap out the door. He somersaulted out of the impact zone as the quinjet slammed into the ground behind him in a cacophony not unlike how AC/DC had sounded to him that first listen. A fire sprouted in the grass a few feet away. Steve used his shield to smother it.
He rolled onto his back. He could see Natasha some distance away, floating gently toward earth. Maria Hill had doubtless landed a mile or two back. Empty fields stretched to the horizon in every direction, as ideal a landscape for parachuting as you could hope for. Iron Man had vanished into the clear blue sky.
“Has he done that before?”
“Used hair metal to announce his presence?” Natasha said. They were debriefing in the helicarrier on what was supposed to be Steve’s day off, though the army had long ago taught him never to count on those. “Unfortunately.”
“Hacked into our systems like that. Did we know he had that kind of capability?”
“Not exactly.” Fury’s expression was grim—though not, in fairness, particularly more so than usual. “The obnoxious music’s the closest thing Iron Man’s got to a consistent M.O. He came onto the scene four years ago, but he doesn’t pop up all that often, especially not on US soil.”
“Our most recent sighting of him before yesterday was three weeks ago in Switzerland,” Natasha said. “He kidnapped a leading climate change scientist from his hotel right before an awards ceremony where the guy was supposed to take the top prize. Dr. Tano hasn’t been seen since.”
Steve swiped through Iron Man’s file on the tablet in front of him. It was pretty much as he’d remembered it when Natasha had identified their attacker and he'd tried to call to mind the rundown of active supervillain-level threats he’d gotten shortly after joining SHIELD. There were a couple of fights—one in LA and one in Monaco, both of which SHIELD had termed likely inter-villain conflict, both of which had ended in Iron Man victories. There were sketchy accounts of numerous bombings in the Middle East, though those had dropped off in the last year or two. And there were scattered break-ins, robberies, kidnappings, explosions—none of which painted a clear picture of a larger goal.
“The ease with which he was able to hijack the quinjet is troubling,” Fury said. He sighed. “We should call in Stark.”
Steve coughed, ducking his head to hide that his face was heating. He’d met Tony Stark once, also shortly after joining SHIELD. He hadn’t realized the guy was Tony Stark at the time. He’d been too busy (defrosting, waking up, freaking out, brooding, guinea pig-ing, adjusting) to get all caught up on celebrities and the news. Embarrassingly, he hadn’t even noticed the resemblance to Howard until hindsight kicked in.
He'd just managed to convince the agent assigned to be his minder that he could handle a real modern smartphone. “I appreciate the gesture,” he said, holding up the Jitterbug Easy-to-Use Flip Phone for Seniors they’d given him, with its gigantic numbers that took up the entire screen whenever he dialed or received a call. “But for a 94-year-old I’ve got pretty good vision. Perfect vision, actually.”
Despite what the recent Saturday Night Live skit “Captain America Meets Technology” (10 million Youtube views and climbing) would have people believe, Steve had learned the ropes of his new smartphone pretty quickly. He’d only hit a snag when trying, at Hawkeye’s intense insistence, to download Angry Birds.
“It keeps trying to make me log in,” he explained to the handsome dark-haired man he’d heard one of the agents refer to as “Tony the IT guy.” “But I am logged in, see?”
Despite looking at him with a somewhat bemused expression—this was what happened, Steve figured, when all the exhaustion of adjusting to the status quo depleted his mental energy levels for things like introducing himself in a polite and friendly manner; of course a random SHIELD employee he’d never met would look sideways at Captain America approaching him to demand Angry Birds, but sometimes it was all Steve could do just to get through the day, he’d try to do better next time—Tony fixed the problem easily. He handed Steve’s phone back loaded up with Angry Birds, Temple Run, and a special-access beta of a game called Candy Crush he swore was going to be huge. “I put my number in there, too. Call if you need anything. Not just tech stuff.”
“Thanks,” Steve said, grateful to Tony for being one of the few people not to treat him like a) a child, b) an extremely senior citizen, c) an Amazonian tribesman quaintly ignorant of the ways of Western civilization, d) a complete idiot, or e) all of the above, since he’d awoken from the ice. Tony’s grip was warm and firm when Steve shook his hand; his eyes glinted with the slightest sparkle of something like mischief. It set off a distant bell in Steve’s head. Only once he was back in his apartment, scrolling through his pathetically paltry list of contacts, did he see the name Tony Stark ;) and realize what an idiot he was.
“Do you really think that’s a good idea, sir?” Natasha asked.
“We already have him working with Communications on security. I wanted to keep his involvement limited, but this thing with the quinjet is a serious vulnerability. If there’s one person capable of keeping Iron Man off our ass, it’s Tony Stark. Hell, I wouldn’t hate having some of that arc reactor technology he’s been developing either.” Fury frowned, attention refocusing on the holograph projection showing yesterday’s flight path—a smooth arc from New York to San Francisco, and a return journey that barely made it two hundred miles before turning sharply off-course, then ending abruptly. “Were you able to get an idea of why Iron Man hijacked the jet?”
Natasha glanced sideways at Steve. He shrugged. “He rerouted us north before downing the plane five minutes later, after I put up the beginnings of a fight. Said we were headed for Seattle.”
“Specifically the Space Needle.” Natasha’s lips quirked, like the smirk was threatening a comeback. (Steve was lucky she hadn’t heard him in the shower this morning; Highway to Hell had gotten stuck in his head something awful.) “He asked Cap on a date. What was his stated objective, again? Him eating lobster off your fork, or vice versa?”
Fury’s undamaged eyebrow raised. Steve rolled his eyes. “He also claimed to want world peace and a pony. He was just trying to throw us off. We know he’s not big on consistency. I doubt propositioning me is going to become a pattern.”
Not only did it become a pattern, propositioning Steve seemed to actually replace Iron Man’s other established pattern of blasting AC/DC. When Steve rappelled into the National Biodefense Analysis and Countermeasures Center, a Biosafety Level 4 laboratory in Maryland, the music piping through the building was startlingly familiar. It reminded him of being ten years old and standing on the sidewalk outside one of Brooklyn’s dancehalls—the Rosemont, maybe, or the Arcadia, even Grand Prospect—and Bucky daring him to see if he could sneak in and get a sip of beer without anyone noticing.
You could have a great career, and you should. Only one thing stops you, dear—you’re too good!
Iron Man was easy to find: all Steve had to do was follow the voice singing enthusiastically along with the recording. “If you want a future, darling, why don’t you get a past? ‘Cause that fatal moment’s coming at last…” Glass shattered. “Whoopsie-daisy. Jarvis, that didn’t have anything toxic in it, did it?”
Steve paused just outside the room, listening. Iron Man’s accomplice must have spoken in his ear, because a moment later he picked up the tune again, perfectly cheery: “We’re all alone, no chaperone can get our number. The world’s in slumber, let’s misbehave!”
“I don’t think this is the kind of misbehavior Cole Porter had in mind,” Steve said, stepping inside.
“Captain!” Though Iron Man’s face—such as it was—remained impassive as ever, his tone-modulated voice managed to convey what sounded like genuine delight. “Perfect timing. Listen to this next verse—there’s something wild about you, child, that’s so contagious—get it? Contagious? Let’s be outrageous, let’s misbehave!”
Steve held out his hand. “Give me the vial.”
“What vial? Oh, you mean this vial? Sorry, too risky. Even you’re not vaccinated against Crimean–Congo hemorrhagic fever. They didn’t officially identify the thing until ‘44, and every vaccine anybody’s come up with since has had this unfortunate side effect of being fatally toxic.”
“Then we agree,” Steve said, moving slowly closer, hand still extended, “that that vial shouldn’t leave this lab.”
“Did I say that? I don’t remember saying that. Don’t put words in my mouth, Cap. If you’d like to put in something else, though…” Steve had a feeling that if Iron Man had eyebrows and could waggle them, he’d be doing it now.
“You said it was too risky.”
“To let you have it. You can’t go having hemorrhagic fever before I’ve had the chance to show you a good time. Like the song says—wait, the verse is coming—just one sec—I feel quite sure un peu d’amour would be attractive while we’re still active. Let’s misbehave! God, this song is apt as hell.”
“So you’re fine with allowing millions of others to develop hemorrhagic fever?”
“That depends. Does anybody among these millions have as exquisitely-shaped a backside as yours?”
“Iron Man.” Steve couldn’t keep frustration from seeping into his voice. For every step he’d advanced, Iron Man took one back. They were circling the room in a ridiculous, dangerous gavotte. “You just said yourself I’m not vaccinated against it. I”—and my exquisitely-shaped backside, he almost said but didn’t—“could get it too.”
“Well, sure, but you’ve got that red-white-and-blue immune system, you’d pull through in the end. And it’d give me a chance to nurse you back to health. Classic Florence Nightingale fantasy. I could totally pull off a little lace cap, don’t you think?”
“So that’s your endgame, then? You want to be responsible for a worldwide pandemic? You want those millions of deaths on your conscience?”
“I never said that, either.” Iron Man sighed. “Look, this is much less fun when you’re looking at me like you think I might be about to haul off on a mass-murder spree. I’m taking the vial”—a tiny panel slid open in his chest, right over where a heart would be, and accepted the vial with a soft pneumatic thwip before closing back up—“but I’m not gonna release it. You have it on my honor as a Boy Scout.”
“You were a Boy Scout?” Steve said skeptically.
“Well, not technically. There was this whole thing involving a burned-down gym—totally not my fault, but the Scoutmaster’s gotta find someone to blame, and guess which kid he chooses? The one with the shiny metal skin and glowing eyes. That’s prejudice for you. Now.”
He held out his hand exactly as Steve had earlier. They say that bears have love affairs, and even camels, the song crooned. We’re merely mammals—let’s misbehave! “May I have this dance?”
Steve launched himself at Iron Man full-force. Momentum sent them both crashing back into a glass cabinet. At least there was nothing in this room to worry about accidentally releasing; three antechambers separated them from the containment unit from which Iron Man had stolen the vial. Steve hauled back his arm and landed a solid punch to Iron Man’s head. He got in a couple more hits before Iron Man’s repulsors sent him flying across the room.
“This is too fast to be a slow dance,” Iron Man complained, aiming a plasma bolt at Steve’s chest. Steve somersaulted behind a counter to avoid it, grabbing his shield from a pile of broken glass as he came back up. “Don’t get me wrong, I’m down for a little bump n’ grind, but that’s not really the vibe of this song.”
It's getting late and while I wait my poor heart aches on. Steve flung his shield at Iron Man, then delivered a full-body kick to his chest while he was still off balance. Why keep the brakes on? Iron Man slammed him into a counter. Let’s misbehave!
“Who sings this version, anyway?” Steve asked, rolling away from a punch. Iron Man’s fist splintered the countertop.
“The Arctic Monkeys.”
You know my heart is true—
Steve raised his shield just in time to block another plasma blast. “Never heard of them.”
—and you say you for me care.
“What the hell kind of 21st-century acclimation program is SHIELD running?”
Steve leapt onto a counter and launched himself into the ceiling, grabbing onto an enormous metal pipe. He brought it crashing down on Iron Man’s head.
“I’m still working my way through the Beatles.”
Somebody’s sure to tell, but what the hell do we care?
“All right, that’s fair.” For a split second Steve thought that Iron Man was aiming ridiculously wide. But the missiles hit their actual intended target, blowing out the north wall in a burst of fire and rubble.
If you would just be sweet and only meet your fate, dear…
“I’d blow you a kiss, but this isn’t an appropriate place to play around with airborne phenomena.” Iron Man dodged Steve’s attempt to grab him, soaring out of the hole he’d created. He sang along to the last line of the song as he flew into the night: “’Twould be a great event to take you on a date, dear!”
Steve’s smartphone had been loaded with swing and jazz and big band music when his minder handed it to him. One of SHIELD’s attempts at preserving some element the 1940s simulacrum he’d woken up in, he figured, borne out of the fear they seemed to harbor that one drop of modernity too much would send him straight off the deep end. He was grateful for it anyway. The previous night’s encounter had triggered a nostalgia for his childhood that was more comfortable than the sharp-toothed ache for 1945 that had been living in his chest for so many months. He put the music on shuffle as he set off on his morning run, letting the familiar strains and the steady centering calm of exercise sweep him into a kind of mindlessness.
He was eight miles in when an unfamiliar song came on, jarringly different in tone and texture. Steve looked at his phone. It was playing R U Mine? by the Arctic Monkeys.
He still had half his run to go. He let the song keep playing. After a few more Crosby and Sinatra tunes, he cued it up again. He liked the sound of it, despite himself. He paid a little more attention to the lyrics the third time through, and snorted at the line unfair we’re not somewhere misbehaving for days.
Steve turned his phone in when he got back to SHIELD, asking the IT department to strip-search it for viruses or malware or anything else that could’ve been covertly airdropped into its pathways of copper and fiberglass. He didn’t tell them why. The agent that returned the phone to him a week later swore up and down that it was clean as a whistle.
“Huh,” Steve said. R U Mine? the screen asked. He put an earbud in and pressed play.